Thee Daily Star - - Let's make Palestinian-Americans relevant

(Read AAF commentary on the subject in Arabisto.com)


As Palestinians struggle with the implications of the recent Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian-American community must decide for itself the vision for a future Palestine it embraces, and the way it seeks to partake in its achievement. The Palestinian national vision has been defined by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) since 1988 as the realization of the two-state solution: Palestine and Israeli living side by side in peace and security. Despite the setbacks and challenges facing this vision, it remains the favored alternative of the overwhelming majority not only of officialdom in the international community but also, as polling has consistently shown, of the Palestinian people. While this remains the view of the majority of Arab-Americans, a vocal challenge to this vision has recently emerged from some Palestinian-Americans in the shape of the so-called "binational, one-state solution."

According to this vision, Palestinians and Jews will live in the whole of historic Palestine as equal citizens in a polity that transcends national and religious definition. That such a vision goes against the very foundations of modern nationalism, that it requires both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples to abandon their nationalist dreams and identities, or that it requires such a fundamental shift in the basic tenets of the whole international system seems of marginal importance to its advocates. They prefer to stress the purity and seeming inclusiveness of this concept. Relying primarily on the false South African analogy, the idealism of student followers, and the inflated influence of cyberspace communications capabilities, they promote an impossible illusion that both distracts dangerously from difficult yet achievable goals and makes their achievement even more challenging.

While the noise created by one-staters in the United States is considerable, this vision has almost no support among Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, who understand that realistic solutions, not idealistic fantasies, are the way out of their daily misery and humiliation.

Lacking a constituency among Palestinians, advocates of this view cling to illusionary allies, mainly non-Zionist Jews who are irrelevant among their own Israeli and Jewish communities. Ironically, these advocates become unwitting allies of the hard-line US and Israeli right in declaring the two-state solution dead, giving fodder to those who would deny Palestinian statehood out of bigotry and racism.

In addition, and as we have seen recently after Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza, the one-staters inevitably ally themselves with Islamist movements that oppose the two-state solution. This leads to a paradox that the one-staters, many of whom are socially liberal, end up supporting organizations and ideologies that have failed to present any coherent moral, social, or political project, and whose behavior in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere has been characterized by repression, terrorism, violence, intolerance and the stifling of pluralism.

Outlandish ideas are not the exclusive domain of the Palestinian-American community, and as long as they remain within the realm of individual thinking, they are not damaging. However, alarm bells go off when such visions become identified with the community at large. The Palestinian-American community is prone to this, since it is largely absent from the American political system in an organized fashion.

What underlies the tension within the Palestinian-American community is not only the struggle of ideas, but - more importantly - the struggle to define the political role the community seeks for itself.

If Palestinian-Americans presume to speak for the Palestinian people and to take leadership over from those in Palestine, they will find themslves left behind: National decisions will be taken by Palestinians living in their homeland, based on their own considerations of reality and achievability and their economic and political interests, not on the visions of purity advocated by a distant and often disconnected diaspora.

Similarly, if the Palestinian-American community fails to be part of American political life, if it chooses simply to condemn the US and play the role of the perpetual victim, it will consign itself to irrelevance and, worse, suspicion and exclusion. This would be a shame for a community that exceeds the national average in education and standard of living, and whose ancestral history is one of tolerance and religious pluralism.

The only space in which the community can be effective is within the America body politic, with special sensitivity to Palestinian interests that are aligned with US interests. Within that space, the margin of action is quite wide: Whether within the political party system, or in a non-partisan issue-oriented setting, one can point to numerous American-Palestinian organizational and individual success stories.

The Palestinian-American community must decide: It can either live in a political and national no-man's land, away from Palestine but not really part of America, or it can get its hands dirty, engage the Palestinian and American reality, and make a difference. The challenges facing Palestinian-Americans as newcomers on the US political scene have been faced before by other groups, including American Jews. These challenges can be overcome given unity in the community and in its message, and, above all, through participation in the American political system.


Raafat Dajani is executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine. Ghaith al-Omari is senior fellow at the New America Foundation. They wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.



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